![]() That's what propelled me to get a PhD in creative writing, because I felt like I had this academically viable context into which I could place my work. It was during those years that I was first exposed to trauma theory I started learning as much as I could about it. I came across trauma theory when I took a few years off between my MFA and my PhD programs. What interest did you have in creating a story that held water from an academic standpoint? That distance I felt from her was what allowed me to create this tone and this voice of hers, which allows the reader to see the manipulation and abuse happening, even as she doesn't.ĮSQ: I was fascinated by your reading list, particularly the subsection about academic texts. That allowed me to see my own work more objectively, and that's where I felt distance from Vanessa even as I was pushing the narrative into this cool first-person. ![]() It was by really immersing myself in critical trauma theory and later what's called "girl studies" as a PhD student that I was able to figure out these theoretical frameworks that the work fit into. It took a long time for that to evolve, and that was the process of me growing up-my own personal perspective changing not just as a woman and a human being, but as I delved deep into trauma and tried to understand PTSD, especially complex PTSD, which is defined as a result of prolonged, continuous trauma rather than acute trauma. There wasn't that way to read it where you see that Strane is being manipulative and abusive, even though Vanessa doesn't see it. That tension between the reader’s perspective and Vanessa’s perspective wasn’t there. I was approaching the material from the perspective that teenage Vanessa would be approaching it. When I first started writing the book as a teenager and even well into my twenties, I saw things in a romanticized way. In that way, she remained herself throughout that long writing process, but pretty much everything else evolved. Even when I was a teenager conceptualizing this character, she came to me fully formed, which is something I can't really explain. Kate Elizabeth Russell: It did change, though in other ways it very much stayed constant, especially in terms of Vanessa. How did it change over such a long incubation period? Esquire spoke with Russell about mythologies of victimhood, the role the #MeToo movement played in shaping this novel, and the decision to come forward with her own story.Įsquire: You worked on this novel for almost two decades. My Dark Vanessa accomplishes exactly that, wrestling as it does with the complexity of victimhood and the hypocrisy of cultural messaging directed at young girls. She wrote, “My greatest wish is that My Dark Vanessa will spark conversation about the complexity of coercion, trauma, and victimhood, because while these stories can feel all too familiar, victims are not a monolith and there is no universal experience of sexual violence.” Russell left Twitter, and in the days to follow, she released a statement informing readers that My Dark Vanessa draws on personal experiences with older men from her teenage years. As the conversation about literary gatekeeping intensified, some argued that Russell should disclose her own trauma in order to prove that the story was authentically her own. In January, Russell came into the crosshairs of literary Twitter when it was implied that she'd plagiarized Exacavation, a memoir by the Latinx writer Wendy Ortiz about sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher.
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